Perhaps the most large-scale technical change impacting silent-period cinematog-raphy was the electrification of film lighting. Around the turn of the century, most films were shot in bright daylight. When a filmmaker wanted to simulate a lighting effect, it might be painted into the set, as in Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903), where one set creates the impression of moonlight with shadows daubed directly onto the floor. By the 1920s, virtually all interior scenes were shot under artificial lighting, and even some nominally exterior scenes had been moved into the enclosed indoor studios. Industrialization’s demand for efficiency provided a powerful impetus for this widespread shift: as the commitment to mass production grew more system-atic, filmmakers turned away from unreliable daylight and adopted controllable electricity. Still, for all its apparent inevitability, it is important to recall that many filmmakers resisted the switch for many years. As late as 1915, an article on light-ing might include the remark, “Mr. Electric Lamp cannot yet compete with the fellow who runs the sun.”13 This preference was partly due to daylight’s technical advantages (daylight was very bright and had a blue color temperature well suited to orthochromatic film stocks), but the naturalness of daylight also gave it an independent aesthetic appeal that was bolstered by the fact that painters and still photographers had long used natural lighting to craft their own works.
Instead of shifting rapidly from daylight to artificial light, the industry made the change gradually, first exploring several intermediate steps. The first films,
such as Dickson’s shorts for Edison, had been shot under hard daylight beaming through the glass ceiling of the Black Maria. Around the turn of the century, as Barry Salt notes, filmmakers borrowed an idea from their peers in still photogra-phy, diffusing the sunlight in order to soften the light.14 Stretching sheets over the windows gave the filmmaker a plethora of options: a black cloth would produce a shadow, a muslin sheet would diffuse the light, and no sheet at all could produce a bright highlight effect. Frontal lighting remained an option, but many filmmakers preferred a soft sidelight for its ability to model the subject’s features, and by the 1910s filmmakers were experimenting with using the sun as a backlight, already a popular technique in outdoor shooting. During this early period, editing within a scene was still somewhat rare, and the diffuse daylight style allowed filmmakers to stage the action in depth, often with a remarkable degree of precision.15
We cannot assume that cinematographers who relied on daylight lacked aesthetic ambition. Quite the contrary: painters had employed natural light for centuries, and the best portrait photographers often preferred to use a large win-dow to re-create the appearance of an Old Master painting.16 In the hands of a good cinematographer, the diffuse daylight system was capable of producing some remarkable effects. In Griffith’s One Is Business, the Other Crime (1912), cinema-tographer Billy Bitzer artfully combines diffuse and direct sunlight. In figure 1.4, the bulk of the set is lit indirectly, producing even illumination all over the room, but the actor on the right (Charles West) has stepped into a foreground position
Figure 1.4: A combination of hard and diffuse sunlight separates foreground and background in One Is Business, the Other Crime (1912).
just in front of the right wall, and the result is a striking natural “spotlight” effect, with direct sunlight isolating the alienated protagonist from the rest of the space.
Barry Salt points out similarly striking effects from Regeneration (Raoul Walsh, 1915), in which cinematographer René Guissart opens up small cracks between the diffusing sheets, letting direct sunlight peep onto the set to pick out an actor’s face, while allowing the soft daylight to provide general illumination.17
Although diffuse daylight was indeed a powerful creative tool, the conve-nience of electric light, which could work day or night, winter or summer, was hard to ignore. During the 1910s, many studios employed daylight as the pri-mary source while offering an array of artificial sources for use in “emergency”
situations, such as a cloudy day.18 Biograph, which had been one of the first stu-dios to equip a stage with Cooper Hewitt mercury vapor tubes back in 1903, also favored a versatile approach.19 In 1910, the company adopted the practice of sending D. W. Griffith and his team to Los Angeles for filming in the winter months (January to June); there, cinematographer Billy Bitzer relied on daylight as the primary source, as in the previously mentioned example from One Is Busi-ness, the Other Crime.20 Meanwhile, the company’s New York building continued to provide filmmakers with the option of using artificial lighting in an enclosed space, as in Friends (Griffith, 1912, d.p. Bitzer).21 From a stylistic perspective, it is important to note that films lit by electric light and films lit by the sun often looked quite similar, especially before 1915, when filmmakers began using carbon arcs more frequently. Unlike the hard arc lamp, the Cooper Hewitt was valued precisely for its ability to imitate the soft overall appearance of diffuse daylight.22 Apart from occasional effects, Bitzer typically illuminated every corner of the set, whether he was working on the sunlit West Coast or the electrified East, using bright illumination to present a crisp, legible space.
Winter posed a number of problems for filmmakers in cold-weather cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Not only did the cold produce damaging static in the cameras; short days and cloudy skies made it difficult to mass-produce films on a reliable schedule. Like Biograph, many studios solved this problem by sending crews to warm-weather locations, such as Florida and Southern Califor-nia.23 The resulting construction boom in the Los Angeles area produced a mixture of daylight and electric studios. When Universal City opened in 1915, the facilities included one open-air stage, one artificial light studio, and glass stages with dif-fusion systems.24 Universal soon invested more heavily in artificial lighting, and Edison himself was asked to lay the cornerstone for a new electric studio built in late 1915, drawing on the inventor’s mythical status as the father of electric light and the father of cinema, two children reunited once again.25
Daylight’s natural advantages declined in importance as electric lights grew more powerful, and as the increasing role of analytical editing made staging in depth a less popular option. By 1918, studios were painting over their glass roofs, committing fully to the artificial light aesthetic. According to an article
on Goldwyn’s Fort Lee studio, “Natural light, the cameramen say, only interferes with proper artificial lighting, and since they cannot have proper natural lighting at all times they prefer to have it wholly shut out.”26 Though many filmmakers had been relying on a hybrid system for years, artificial lighting was becoming the symbol of a mature, technologically advanced industry, and studios were competing with each other to invest in electricity more heavily. For a time, the competition was geographical: New York–based producer Pat Powers argued that the shift to artificial light had eliminated California’s natural advantage in sun-shine and called for a return to shooting based in the East.27 By then Powers was fighting a losing battle, as the Los Angeles studios were investing in electricity on a massive scale, a process that would continue throughout the 1920s. When Powers had built his studio in the Bronx in 1910, it was equipped with a state-of-the-art Cooper Hewitt system that could produce 100,000 candlepower worth of light.28 In 1927, the First National studio in Burbank (now the home of Warner Bros.) reported that its newly built facilities could produce an even more aston-ishing amount of light, measuring the candlepower at 20 billion.29
If industrial efficiency were the only concern, then filmmakers might have been content with the soft light of mercury-vapor tubes, but aestheticization and narrative integration encouraged filmmakers to experiment with a wider variety of lamps. Throughout the 1910s, filmmakers increasingly relied on the carbon arc to produce strong highlights, isolating the subject from the general background lighting provided by the softer Cooper Hewitts. Carbon arcs were particularly well suited to producing “effect lighting,” imitating the appearance of a table lamp or moonlight streaming through a window. Early examples appeared in D. W.
Griffith’s films A Drunkard’s Reformation (1909) and Pippa Passes (1909), both credited to Bitzer, though Barry Salt argues that Arthur Marvin may have been responsible for the lighting effects.30 A few years later, the Jesse Lasky Company hired the art director Wilfred Buckland, who had experience designing both sets and lighting effects for the theater director David Belasco. A contemporary arti-cle about Buckland emphasized his aesthetic goals, reporting that he hoped “to produce a film which will stand out for its superior art.”31 Soon, the company became known for “Lasky lighting,” employing floodlights and spotlights to pro-duce images with strong contrasts, most notably in the films of Cecil B. DeMille and his cinematographer Alvin Wyckoff, with Buckland serving as art director.
Their films from the middle of the decade feature several remarkable examples of effect lighting, as in the fireplace and flashlight shots from The Golden Chance (1915). In figure 1.5, an arc light to the left of the camera illuminates the two subjects, imitating a flashlight and casting a hard shadow on the side wall. As Lea Jacobs points out, the fact that these are motivated lighting effects should not lead us to conclude that the filmmakers have adopted the norm of classical unobtrusiveness. These are spectacular effects, intended to be appreciated as bold dramatic touches in the manner of a Belasco play.32 Indeed, much of the film is
shot in a more diffuse style, with the most dramatic effects saved for key turning points, as in this scene, when the brutal husband is surprised to find his wife sleeping at the house he is trying to rob.
In a 1922 interview, Wyckoff reflected on the first few decades of cinematogra-phy and proposed a three-stage history of early film lighting. His remarks, though hardly impartial, serve to illustrate how cinematographers were beginning to situate their own work within an emerging historical narrative of the growth of cinematic art. Wyckoff calls the first stage the “commercial period,” implying that cameramen had not yet come to think of films as artworks: “Straight, flat pho-tography unrelieved by highlight or shadow was the invariable rule.”33 Next came
“continuity lighting,” the stage when cinematographers designed their lighting to imitate the appearance of a specific source, as in the effect lighting just described.
Wyckoff rightly argues that technology did not drive this transition, since it long had been possible to create lighting effects through the clever arrangement of diffusing screens and sunlight. By rejecting technological determinism, Wyckoff affirms the cinematographer’s status as a creative artist in control of a proliferating collection of tools. Wyckoff then suggests that his most recent work on DeMille’s films was commencing a new stage in lighting: “lighting for temperament.” Here, a cinematographer might ignore the question of plausible motivation and light each space solely according to the mood of the story. As an example, we might point to the climactic scene of DeMille and Wyckoff’s Affairs of Anatol (1921, co-photographed with Karl Struss), where the characters are lit from below to cre-ate a demonic atmosphere, regardless of realistic concerns.
Figure 1.5: An arc light imitates the effect of a flashlight in a dramatic scene from The Golden Chance (1915).
Wyckoff’s historical distinctions are certainly not clear-cut. The example from The Golden Chance is quite expressive, even if Wyckoff himself would put it in his second category, and cinematographers never abandoned the goal of obtaining a good exposure on the important details. Instead, Wyckoff’s categories demon-strate that cinematographers were already thinking of their work in multifaceted terms: as an industrial product manufactured with concern for efficiency; as a form of storytelling communicating information about time, space, and charac-ter; and as an art form offering new pictorial possibilities.
Perhaps the most important strategy missing from Wyckoff’s list was figure lighting, the use of light and shadow to shape the subject’s face. Fittingly, this technique grew in importance as the continuity system placed increasing empha-sis on the close-up. Around the middle of the 1910s, when films often were lit with a combination of diffuse daylight and soft Cooper Hewitt units, cinema-tographers often preferred to illuminate the subject from the side, allowing the large soft source to produce gentle gradations of shadow on the subject’s face. In figure 1.6, from Hell’s Hinges (Charles Swickard, 1916, d.p. Joseph August), notice the simplicity of the lighting scheme: there is no backlight, and no glaring fill light to blow out the shadows. Yet the lighting is still quite effective, modeling the woman’s face and drawing our attention to her eyes, which feature a bright point of light reflecting the soft side source. Cinematographer Joseph August would go on to have a long career in Hollywood, commanding megawatts of electricity in films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle, 1939), but he never surpassed the elegant simplicity of this soft-key style.
Figure 1.6: figure lighting with diffuse illumination from the side and no backlight in Hell’s Hinges (1916).
Soon, figure lighting became so important that directors were hiring cinema-tographers with training in portrait photography to create flattering close-ups of the stars. Wyckoff’s arc light effects could be strikingly unflattering, and, to com-pensate for his deficient skills in portraiture, soon he was paired with the renowned photographer Karl Struss, just as Billy Bitzer was asked to collaborate with por-traitist Hendrik Sartov.34 Tony Gaudio, Arthur Edeson, and Charles Rosher also joined the ranks of cinematographers after beginning their careers in photography studios.35 Although these portraitists were skilled at using diffuse daylight to model features in a gentle fashion, they also embraced the opportunity to experiment with more electric lamps than any still photographer could possibly afford.
By the late 1910s, three-point lighting was becoming the dominant norm, using a key light to model the subject’s face, a fill light to control the resulting shadows, and a backlight to separate the subject from the background.36 Figure 1.7 is from Frances Marion’s The Love Light (1921), co-photographed by Rosher and Henry Cronjager. Mary Pickford is lit with a key light to the right of the camera, but the fill light just to the left of the camera is of almost equal brightness, result-ing in relatively flat modelresult-ing on Pickford’s face, drawresult-ing attention to her eyes and mouth. Meanwhile, two backlights brighten Pickford’s famous blonde hair, which registered darker than normal on the orthochromatic film. Perhaps the most remarkable detail is the way the key and fill lights produce little points of light in Pickford’s eyes, amplifying her welling tears. Rosher was Pickford’s regular cine-matographer, and he took pride in his attention to detail, claiming in an interview with Kevin Brownlow that he often arranged her hair and selected her makeup.37
Figure 1.7: three-point lighting on mary pickford’s face in The Love Light (1921).
Though three-point lighting would continue to be a default figure-lighting option for cinematographers, they began to tinker with the technique right away, perhaps by adding an extra backlight or by varying the ratio between key and fill light. In Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Ingram, 1921), John F. Seitz would use two sidelights to produce a distinct shadow in the middle of a subject’s face, a technique Salt has called “core-lighting.”38 Later, in The Magician (Ingram, 1926), the genre of the story (horror) gave Seitz the opportunity to make the villain, German star Paul Wegener, look as grotesque as possible, a feat accomplished with a mixture of top lighting and lighting from below. In figure 1.8, a light from below distorts Wegener’s features, emphasizing the circles under his eyes and the creases on his forehead, while also emphasizing the actor’s nose with a long shadow stretching up across his face.
This example raises the question of German Expressionism’s influence on the Hollywood style in the 1920s and beyond. Expressionism was certainly a proximate influence on The Magician. Not only was the film shot in Europe; Wegener himself had co-directed and starred in The Golem (1920), often considered an Expressionist classic. Still, as Barry Salt and Marc Vernet remind us, Hollywood filmmakers had been using light expressively for years, so expressive lighting by itself is not necessar-ily a marker of Expressionism in a strong sense of the term.39 One can find examples of elaborate shadow play throughout the 1910s, not only in films by self-consciously artistic directors like Cecil B. DeMille (The Cheat, 1915, d.p. Alvin Wyckoff) and Maurice Tourneur (Victory, 1919, d.p. René Guissart), but also in comedic films like Fatty and Mabel Adrift (Roscoe Arbuckle, 1916, d.p. unknown) and Haunted
Figure 1.8: expressive lighting from below in the horror film The Magician (1926).
Spooks (Hal Roach and Alfred Goulding, 1920, d.p. Walter Lundin). In all these examples, it can be useful to follow Salt’s advice and use the term “expressivist” for a wide range of mood-enhancing effects, reserving the term “Expressionist” for cases where the influence of the German movement is more direct.40
Technological factors also had an influence on the emerging styles of figure lighting. Toward the end of the silent period, cinematographers began the switch from orthochromatic to panchromatic film stock, which was much more sensi-tive to reds and yellows.41 Not only did this new stock allow cinematographers to capture certain traits, such as blond hair, more easily; panchromatic stocks encouraged cinematographers to abandon the arc lamp in favor of the incandes-cent, since the warmer color temperature of the latter was better suited to the new stock. Incandescents produce light that is generally softer than that produced by arc lamps, further encouraging cinematographers to explore the creative possibilities of gentle lighting on a star’s face. With the conversion to sound, cinematographers had an additional reason to favor the incandescent, since arc lamps initially produced an unacceptable level of noise, and the “inkie” became the cinematographer’s dominant lamp throughout the next decade.
While adopting the tools of electric lighting, cinematographers had devel-oped a diverse set of visual strategies to satisfy both narrative and aesthetic goals and still meet the standards of efficiency that an industrial system required.
Yet the cinema of attractions has by no means disappeared, as both Ingram’s pictorialism and Pickford’s portraits were both attractions in their own right.
Cinematographers further pursued this complex task of integrating competing demands by adopting an additional repertoire of strategies involving camera-work and other visual techniques.